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Bayes of thrones

My friend and colleague Andreas sent me a link to a working paper published by a statistician at the University of Christchurch (New Zealand) and discussed here. The main idea of the paper was to use a Bayesian model to predict the number of future chapters will each of the main characters of Game of Thrones feature in.I’m not a great fan of Game of Thrones, but I know many people who are (including in my own household). So I can’t really comment on the results. However, on a very cursory look at the paper, it seems as though the model is based on vague priors for all the parameters, which is kind of a bummer, as I would have thought this is the kind of model for which you do have some strong subjective (or “expert”) prior to use… Still, nice idea, I think…